The Grocery Store Produce Red Flag You Need To Know

A produce department should be a gateway to a nice grocery shopping experience, with loads of fresh fruit and vegetables welcoming you into the store. However, there are some red flags to look out for, including a big one that may be obvious but can have far-reaching implications.

Be wary of any foul, rancid, or otherwise "off" odors in your grocery store's produce department. Fresh vegetables typically have a mild but pleasant smell. Alliums (bulb-shaped vegetables like onions and garlic) should have no smell at all because their unmistakable fragrance is a sign of cell walls breaking down. In the case of uncut alliums at the supermarket, that means decomposition.

Fruits generally have stronger smells, but these fresh and sweet scents are easily identifiable. Oranges smell like oranges, bananas smell like bananas, and so forth. Nothing (with the exception of durian and, according to some, jackfruit) should smell anything like spoiled or rotting food. If you get a whiff of decay in the produce department, it's a sign that fruits and veggies might be spoiling on store shelves. It also bodes poorly for the rest of the store.

Foul odors are among the biggest red flags for a grocery store's produce department, but bad smells can also suggest that other areas are falling behind. Grocers place produce at the front of the store because it looks appetizing. Fresh, beautiful fruits and vegetables are intended to entice shoppers into buying more food.

Visually appealing produce near the front of the store is such a good moneymaker that some grocery stores mist their produce just to make it look more attractive, as though it was going to appear in an advertisement. Greeting shoppers with beautiful, appetizing products is essential to the success of any grocery operation.

Simply put, if a store is failing on this basic introduction to its products, there's a decent chance it's falling behind in other departments as well. If the produce department smells a little sour, you'll also likely find leaky packaging in the meat department or lukewarm temperatures inside dairy coolers. Think of it as an early warning system for quality control issues.